I have to run two, completely separate businesses, and juggling between them in a single day is very hard. At the end of the day, I am often exhausted emotionally when I reach home.

What is more troubling is not the emotional exhaustion, but rather the "mood spillover". I would often work on one business in the morning, and another business in the afternoon. More often than not, whatever bad things that happen to the business in the morning will seriously affect my mood the whole day, leaving me unable to attend to other, unrelated matters. As a result, my mood suffer, and my coworkers can't get the necessary attention from me because I can't manage my mood and emotions very well.

Anyway I can deal with this problem? My current living standard needs the income from these two businesses, so letting them go is not an option ( and neither it is a solution, too). I need to be able to regulate my emotion and mood well independent of what happens to my situation, but I can't do that.

3 Answers
3

Do you have a purpose in your life? Or just work, make money and consume? Do you have a family to feed? Or do you only need to pay your credit cards for clothing you bought but weren't necessary at all ?

I am in the same situation, working at 100 things at once. I've gone burnout a hundred times and I can only tell you one thing: find a purpose to go through it. Imaging how people fought at wars. How people have been fighting with cancers and other life-threatening diseases. You need a purpose to focus on. Then everything else becomes just noise.

If it doesn't work that way, change something. Your vision or your work. As Alice was told in Wonderland "it doesn't matter which road you choose If you don't know where you're going".

I believe man was meant to be free and not working for 16 hrs/day in a concrete cubicle by moving only his eyes. This is my two cents. Thing about it.

Maybe you need a midday ritual that will help you reset how you're feeling for your second job?

Go for a walk, do some other sort of exercise, maybe yoga, spend 30 minutes hitting a punching bag? Whatever it is, make it a conscious, cognitive distancing ritual that puts the morning in its place and prepares you for whatever the afternoon brings.

Also, try to remember that you are effectively two people: Morning Person and Afternoon Person. Use your midday ritual to remind yourself that Afternoon Person needs to operate free of Morning Person's mood. In effect, Afternoon Person is not being paid to solve Morning Person's problems, and absolutely Afternoon Person's coworkers are not being paid extra to carry Morning Person around on their shoulders.
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planetthoughtfulApr 2 '14 at 0:49

You need to find empathy. It helps to have a trusted person who can understand what you are going through and with whom you can share you experiences.

Often there is a gap between how you think things ought to be and how they actually are. Its ok to feel the frustrations from every day life in this regard, but you do need to be aware of, and recognize your feelings.

Take a moment and do a reality check on your own expectations. Are you being realistic with yourself? It helps to bounce things off others to see if things are actually good enough as they are. They may or they may not be. You'll only know if you ask.

Understanding your own and other's expectations of what you do provides you with a solid foundation of whats really important and helps you approach your next steps with a sense of what is real.